My thoughts and experiences about software development

Primary Menu

Use Brain Writing to make your retrospectives more equal

If you are struggling with quiet team members who never say a word during retrospectives, or on the contrary, loud team members who don’t understand to let the others speak once in a while, then brain writing could be brilliant for you!

Brain writing is a technique for brainstorming in a group. It can be used during the “generate insight” phase of the retrospective.

Everyone starts with a stack of blank papers and a pen. They get 3 minutes to write down ideas, one per paper. When the timer rings everyone passes their papers to the right and receive papers from the person to the left.

Now you have a new ideas which you can use for inspiration. You can either add things on the paper if the idea sparks new ones related to the one on the paper or start a new paper if you come up with something entirely different.

The exercise is over when the first papers come back to the original author. Now put the papers up on a wall or lay them out on the table and have everyone read through them and be awed by the amount of generated ideas!

We used this template for writing down ideas:
“To be better at __________
We need to ________________
Every _____________________”

For example we had:
“To be better at knowledge sharing
we need to do more mob programming
every now and then”

I love brain writing because:

it is a silent activity, everyone is on equal terms. The loud person doesn’t get too much space and the quiet person gets hir ideas heard as well

building upon other people’s ideas is inspiring and creates a lot of “yes, and …!” moments

the template made us focus on purpose of suggested actions.

Finish with a round of silent prioritization for “Decide what to do”, pick your top 1-3 and you’re ready to start working on some inspiring improvements!